You are here

Library News

Kelly McBride, Coordinator of Information Literacy & Instruction in Belk Library & Information Commons, is the 2016 recipient of the Harvey R. Durham Outstanding Freshman Advocate award. The award honors one full-time Appalachian State University employee each year who has contributed significantly to improving the freshman experience on campus. The recipient each year receives a $1,000.00 award, an inscribed plaque, a medallion, and will hold a one-year appointment on the award committee.

Boone - University Libraries faculty member, Pam Mitchem is the 2016 recipient of the Thornton W. Mitchell Service Award. Pam Mitchem has been a professional archivist for 18 years, working in digitization and digital curation since 2000. She held positions as Preservation and Digital Projects Archivist, Interim University Archivist, and Special Assistant to the Dean of Libraries for Digital Initiatives. Mitchem earned an M.A. in Appalachian studies from Appalachian State University and an Ed.S. in leadership and higher education, also from Appalachian. She is a certified archivist (CA) with the Academy of Certified Archivists and is a Society of American Archivists certified digital archives specialist (DAS). She is at work on her post-masters certificate in data curation at UNC-Chapel Hill and is associate professor and the coordinator of digital scholarship and initiatives team at the Appalachian State University Libraries.

Established in 2003, the Award seeks to recognize an individual who has demonstrated outstanding service to the archival profession in the state of North Carolina by promoting public awareness, appreciation, or support of cultural heritage institutions, preserving historical and cultural resources, providing leadership in archival organizations or associations, or teaching, training, or mentoring new members of the archival profession.

The award honors the late Thornton W. Mitchell, who served as North Carolina State Archivist from 1973 until his retirement in 1981, and was an active member of the archival profession for forty years. The first Thornton W. Mitchell Service Award was presented at the SNCA spring meeting in March 2004.

Congratulations to all the students who are graduating this May, 2016. We especially thank all of our student library employees for their hard work and dedication. Your work in the library is greatly appreciated! You will be missed.

You are invited to attend the first Bivens Occasional Lecture on the Scholarship of Books and Reading. Professor Thomas McLaughlin will deliver the lecture at 5:30pm on Friday, April 29, in Room 114 of the Belk Library and Information Commons. McLaughlin specializes in literary criticism and theory and cultural studies. His lecture, entitled “Reading and the Body: The Physical Practice of Reading,” will be based on his recently published book. Here is a brief description of the lecture:

We tend to think of reading as an act of the disembodied mind, but in fact reading requires skillful use of the eyes and the hands, as well as postures and habits that support their work. The reading body operates within powerful cultural disciplines, but it is also capable of highly idiosyncratic improvisations. “Reading and the Body” examines these physical skills and habits and disciplines, in an effort to understand the contribution of the body to the process of reading, especially in an era in which the material process of reading is changing as our culture moves from the book to the screen.

McLaughlin is also the author of the following books:

Give and Go: Basketball as a Cultural Practice. SUNY Press, 2008.

Street Smarts and Critical Theory. University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Wright is a professor and head of the English department at Western Carolina University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures and theory, ecocriticism and animal studies. She received her undergraduate degree in English from Appalachian in 1992.

Her monographs include “Writing Out of All the Camps: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement” and “Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment.” She is lead editor, with Jane Poyner and Elleke Boehmer, of “Approaches to Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and Other Works.” Her most recent monograph, “The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror” was published by the University of Georgia Press in October of 2015.

Published in 2015 by the University of Georgia Press, “The Vegan Studies Project” has been called “the foundational text for the nascent field of vegan studies.”